Once Promising
Slips of sundry silly somber note papers
lie like lined snow under the desk lamp,
a Christmas tree blind to the calendar,
or without the good sense to know when it’s time
to haul itself out to the curb with the rest of the
dead soldiers of the season.
Words scratched in ink, and some in
point five millimeter medium pencil lead,
and some that made it all the way to “Print”
but still couldn’t find a way
off of the lamp’s snowy skirt, jostle for position,
hoping to catch my attention.
They were young once, radiating with
ideas heretofore unheard of. Never grasping the
reason, they die the proper death of any
foolish fragment of frustrated faulty thought.
Put them all together and it’s possible
you might have a poem of sorts.
.